September 2001 Archives

Information on these two panels is still a bit of a hit and miss affair and with the 'due any day now' release of Mac OS X 10.1 there is a high chance that the Login Panel at least will undergo some major changes.

Editing these panels is made more complicated by the fact that they are implemented in very different ways.

The Boot Panel

This appears to be a single PDF file that is simply displayed, centered on the screen, it does not support transparency or irregular shapes (the only shape that does work is a rectangle). Hopefully some point soon Mac OS X will add native support for the latest version of the PDF spec and more impressive tricks will be possible. There doesn't seem to be anyway to control the position of the progress bar or the text, both these items will appear in a centred region relative to the bottom of the PDF graphic.

The Login Panel

On the one hand more is possible with this panel because a NIB file exist that can be edited, however this also means that the login panel is a titlebarless window and so inherits all of aquas neat-o window features, including the drop shadow and the default aqua stripe background. The graphic is a TIFF file and does support TIFF transparency, but the result of a transparent region is simply to make the aqua stripes visable.

Futher analysis will be made after Mac OS X 10.1 is released.